Should Florida's concealed-carry gun rules be tougher?

At a time when gun ownership has been driven to the forefront of American consciousness, state law is vague on the training requirements to carry one.

LEE WILLIAMS

Lolly Pairgin used to dust around her husband's firearms and then gingerly nudge them out of her way with a pinkie — too deathly afraid of guns to pick up even an unloaded one.

“I'm petrified of guns,” the Michigan snowbird told the staff at Bradenton's Aegis Tactical during a basic firearms course.

Four hours later, Pairgin and two of her friends were hitting eight-inch targets at 21 feet with a 9 mm Glock-19.

Now trained, they can apply for a concealedcarry license in Florida.

Aegis Tactical's owner and lead trainer, Joe Krawtschenko understands the seriousness and vicarious liability of firearms training. He teaches his students not only how to shoot, but also when state law says deadly force can be used.

Pairgin and her friends chose to learn how to use their weapons from someone who gave them authoritative training, but that level of instruction is far from standard in Florida, where more than a million residents have concealed-weapon permits costing $112 apiece.

Some trainers use toy guns or allow students to pull the trigger on a BB-gun, a power drill or a Windex bottle. A few will sell a certificate of competency to a student with no training, experts say. Krawtschenko has had students in his firearms training classes who have never touched a gun even though they've had a concealed-carry license for years, obtained from a less scrupulous instructor.

At a time when gun ownership has been driven to the forefront of American consciousness by the school shooting in Connecticut and by the Obama administration's recent proposals for reducing gun violence, state law is vague on the specifics of training required for a concealed-carry permit. It says only that students must “demonstrate competence” with a gun, leaving much to be interpreted by the thousands of instructors operating independently in the state; their exact number is not known.

Krawtschenko and other instructors are pushing for strengthened requirements for obtaining this type of permit, such as adding a qualification course and lesson plans. They join a long list of proponents who have pushed for such changes over the years.

“I'm signing off on their license,” Krawtschenko said. “If, God forbid, they use it, an attorney will be knocking on my door. I can't do what these other instructors are doing.”

But opponents, including the National Rifle Association, say these instructors have a vested interest in more expansive regulations.

They “have a financial interest in imposing additional restrictions on Second Amendment rights,” said Marion Hammer, the NRA's Florida chief and the first female president of the national organization.

Representatives from Florida Carry.org, a statewide gun rights group, say any additional regulation of training requirements for concealed-carry permits is a meander down a “slippery slope.”

Managers at the Florida Division of Licensing, the state agency charged with issuing concealed- carry licenses, acknowledge that they have no authority to regulate how someone is trained, much less police the trainers themselves. The extent of their power is to deny the license application.

Ken Wilkinson, the division's assistant director, said when his staff learns of a trainer using questionable practices, they stop issuing licenses to the students. “We don't hear that many horror stories, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen,” he said.

Wilkinson declined to comment on the merits of elevated training standards.

“My job is not to have an opinion on the matter,” he said. “My job is to run the division, and follow the directives of the director and commissioner.”

But Wilkinson pointed to the concealed-carry permit requirements in South Carolina — state-certified instructors, a mandatory eight-hour class with lesson plans, and insistence that applicants demonstrate their abilities at a gun range — as a program that is working well.

Some states have more rigorous standards than South Carolina, while only a handful have more relaxed requirements than Florida.

Covering the basics

Krawtschenko is a former deputy sheriff from New Jersey who worked as a civilian contractor in Afghanistan, There, he taught firearms and tactics to U.S and foreign military. When he started Aegis about a year ago, he sought out other trainers with similar experience.

Instructor Chris Ganley fought overseas as an infantryman, and served as a firearms instructor for the Marine Corps. Kevin Murphy retired after 27 years in law enforcement and taught criminal justice to high school students.

The instructors know most entry-level students are not seeking commando-style expertise.

When Pairgin and friends Carmen Duquette and Carmen Myers took their basic firearms course, Murphy and Ganley kept things light, informative and fun. There were no war stories and minimal technical jargon.

Duquette, a snowbird from Canada living in Tennessee, wants to carry a pistol when she hikes in the Smoky Mountains near her home. To do that, she needs a carry permit issued by the state; her training and concealed-carry license here in Florida will allow her to meet those requirements.

“I would feel a lot more secure with a gun,” she said.

Myers, like Pairgin, never handled a weapon before the course and was similarly afraid of her husband's guns. “I had this nightmare — someone breaks in and I didn't know what to do with the guns,” she said.

“You'll be nervous, but you'll overcome that if you want to survive,” Murphy explained.

Using a lesson plan developed in-house, the instructors patiently covered the rules for safe gun handling and basic fundamentals of marksmanship.

Murphy even explained the intricacies of shooting with bifocals.

He took the students through several scenarios — the kind of shoot/don't shoot training given to most police recruits. All three women said they would likely shoot if they saw a middle-aged man jump out of his car, run toward a young girl and drag her kicking and screaming back into his vehicle.

But this wasn't a two-dimensional question. “What if it's his daughter and she had just run away from home?” Murphy asked.

The three novice shooters could have chosen an instructor who lectured for 15 minutes and watched them fire a BB into a bucket of sand.

Krawtschenko knows he is losing business to those kinds of trainers, who churn out students faster and cheaper.

He has written to the governor's office and the licensing division seeking licensing reform — efforts that have produced little results. “There's got to be mandatory qualifications for obtaining a concealed carry license,” Krawtschenko said.

Over the years, other instructors have lobbied for similar change. In a 2006 letter sent to the governor's office and the licensing division, retired Col. James Otto, Sr., a firearms instructor, outlined his concerns about the three-hour licensing classes taught at gun shows. Otto noted that his training classes take three to seven days.

“As an NRA certified firearms instructor and range safety officer, I can no longer trust those carrying permits until I inquire as to their instruction,” Otto wrote.

The licensing division told him it had no regulatory authority over instructors, and was “not empowered by law to prescribe or enforce standards of course or content.”

War stories

Stories of poor training are easy to come by.

In a 2009 complaint letter to the licensing division, Fort Myers attorney J. Patrick Buckley III warned of a gun shop class where, after only 90 minutes of training, students either fire a blank at a Dumpster behind the business or “in the store's restroom, at a toilet.”

Charlotte County Sheriff's Lt. Brian Harrison knows of one gun shop that offers classes where students fire a couple of rounds into a clearing barrel behind the shop.

His agency has offered residents a comprehensive firearms course for years.

A SWAT team commander and certified firearms instructor, Harrison said he would “100 percent support” strengthening mandatory training requirements statewide.

The sheriff's office course is eight hours long, costs only $25 and fills up quickly.

“I'd like to offer the course for free, as a public service,” Harrison said. “Some gun stores charge $100 and knock it out in under an hour.” But he NRA and other opponents of any changes to the rules say such revisions, however well- intentioned, can do more harm than good.

Before 1987 and the passage of the statewide law governing concealed-carry, each county was allowed to issue its own license.

“We had 67 counties doing it 67 different ways,” said Hammer, executive director of the Unified Sportsmen of Florida, the state's legislative NRA affiliate.

Some counties refused to issue any licenses, Hammer noted. Monroe County had a nonrefundable $2,200 application fee. Dade and Broward charged $500 and required a certificate from a psychiatrist attesting that the applicant was “mentally suited to carry firearms,” she said.

“The county got to pick the psychiatrist, and you had to pay the bill,” she said.

Hammer, who also served as NRA president from 1995 to 1998, crisscrossed the state, drumming up support to change the law. She does not want anyone tinkering with the current statute over an issue that she said “crops up regularly.”

“Instructors tend to think they know what's best. That's not always true,” she said. “This legislation was passed in 1987. In all those years, there's never been a single recorded case of an accident or incident with a concealed weapons license holder that resulted from a lack of training.”

The NRA is aware some of its Florida instructors were taking shortcuts, and has taken steps to address that, she said, but there is little recourse for students other than a civil suit against their trainer.

Hammer said some instructors have lobbied for legislation that “embodies their specific course.”

“The would like the Legislature to do their marketing for them,” she said. “They can't demonstrate we need to change the criteria.”

Some states require much more training before issuing a concealed carry permit, while others require no training at all, said Sean Caranna, founder and executive director of Florida Carry Inc., a 9,000-member nonprofit formed to contest “ill-conceived gun control laws.”

“Florida struck a good balance,” said Caranna, who said he is worried an “arbitrary” training requirement could erode Second Amendment protections.

“What's the limit?” he said. “There are people in Tallahassee who will say if you haven't taken an 18-week infantry course, you're not qualified to carry a weapon.”

“It's a slippery slope,” he said. “It would be like saying that before you can write a letter to the editor, you need to take a journalism course.”